The way that absolutely uncommitted sexual encounters are spoken about now suggests that in order to become liberated, a rather cold promiscuity is the order of the day. Some women do not necessarily see this shift as a positive one. Carly Whiteley, the 17-year-old whose words were quoted at length in Chapter Three, is angry that she is growing up in this milieu. ‘It’s all casual sex now, nobody talks about love,’ she said to me. ‘I wish I could have a real connection with a man. But there’s no courtship any more. That’s all dead. It’s just immediate. There’s no getting to know someone, you’re expected just to look someone up and down and make the decision just like that, are you going to have sex or not. There’s no time to build up a connection. The idea is that you have sex first, but how are you meant to create the kind of excitement, the emotional connection, after that? I want to have an emotional connection with a man. I want it to be there with the feeling that I am equal to him. I do think I’m as good as a man. But I don’t want just this no-strings sex stuff.’
I have heard this kind of sad judgement from many young feminists recently. A woman I’ll call Esther, who is twenty-four years old and works in sex education, also feels it is time to challenge this culture in which sex is all performance and no emotional connection. Her desire for something different makes her feel very isolated. ‘The group of girls I was friends with at school were all sexually active from a very young age,’ she said to me. ‘I remember when a friend of mine lost her virginity. It was on a park bench. She was fourteen. There was huge pressure on me to join in with that kind of behaviour, but I didn’t. That wasn’t what I wanted from sex. That kind of casual relationship isn’t right for me, but I was made to feel like a freak right through school and university because of that.’ With the young women that Esther works with now, she feels that: ‘There is a total detachment from emotion when they talk about sex. I remember one young girl I was working with who told me about how she had lost her virginity in the school field at lunchtime one day. She said she had thought, “The bell’s about to go, I may as well do it now or I’ll not do it.” There was this complete detachment from the act itself and what it means. This isn’t rape or sexual abuse, but it isn’t a positive experience. In some ways I find it quite disturbing. But people have so normalised this kind of sexual activity – it’s totally emotionless. The act itself is no longer about intimacy, it’s no longer about communication.’
Esther feels that the culture she sees around her is not a true fulfilment of what feminists fought for in the 1960s. ‘People say that this kind of behaviour began in the 1960s, but I’m not sure. I get the feeling that the ideal of liberated sex in the 1960s was about really loving and valuing your body and being proud of it. Now there is a toxic mix, for young girls, of feeling they have to be sexually active but also feeling very critical of their bodies. So they will have lots of sex, but without pleasure or pride.’
Esther herself is not in a relationship and believes that this is partly because of the disjunction between what she is looking for and what the culture around her encourages. ‘I just don’t want to have a relationship based on this kind of devalued sexual exchange. I know that some of my friends actually think I’m quite extreme in my views, simply because I won’t buy into that culture. I’m made to feel isolated. When I read writers from previous times, I feel rather jealous of them. I mean female writers who could explore their sexuality without having to downgrade it. Look at a writer like Anaïs Nin – for the times, she was quite promiscuous, but every sexual encounter was also about emotional communication. When she was with someone she really embraced what they were like physically and emotionally and they did the same to her. I think that’s what I’m looking for. It’s not because I’m a prude that I don’t want casual sex, but I want emotional experience with the sex. I feel that people around me come from a totally different world.’
Esther’s point interested me; you may not choose the self-conscious Anaïs Nin, who endlessly dissected her sexual experiences in her detailed journals from the 1930s onwards, as your own heroine, but nevertheless there is something memorable about her emotional engagement in her erotic life. Look at the way that Anaïs Nin insists that every encounter with her lover, Henry Miller, is unique: ‘I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by, the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together.’16 That ease with words such as ecstasy and wonder seems excessive to us now, when set beside the cool, unemotional descriptions of our modern memoirists. In contrast, look at the way that Zoe Margolis explains to men how to approach a one-night stand: ‘It’s just sex … If you want a “Girlfriend Experience”, go hire a prostitute.’17 While for Margolis sexual partners are interchangeable, for Nin her lover is irreplaceable: ‘you and I together, not any man or any woman together.’ To be sure, in previous generations many women writers had to repress their physical needs and experiences in order to fall in with social conventions, and feminism was needed to release women from that repression. This meant that women clearly needed to break the cage of chastity, but what I heard from some women is that they feel there is now a new cage holding them back from the liberation they sought, a cage in which repression of emotions takes the place of repression of physical needs.
Many young women I spoke to seem to feel that their lives have been impoverished by the devaluation of sex into exchange and performance rather than mutual intimacy. For a long time our culture sustained the ideal that it is not a lowering of the self but a full flowering of the self to become entirely attuned to another’s desires and feelings, and that there is a great power, even sanctity, in sex between two individuals who have a deep emotional connection. This new culture of shags and threesomes, orgies and stranger fucks, seems to be replacing the culture in which sex was associated with the flowering of intimacy. Although this is so often associated with liberation, I am not convinced that this is what all feminists were seeking, then or now. I kept hearing a frustration from the young women I interviewed, all the sadder because it is often hidden. As Esther put it, ‘I want to be with a man who sees sex as an intense experience, a unity, and people just don’t now – sex has become completely devalued.’ Or as Rachel Gardner, the youth worker who was quoted in Chapter Three, said to me, ‘Feminism is now seen as sexual promiscuity, which is such a narrow view of empowerment. Liberation isn’t just about promiscuity. For some women liberation may be about having a new sexual partner every week, but for a lot of women it will be about finding someone to be with for your whole life, growing together over the years, and you never hear about that any more. What liberation means to me is that in any sexual relationship you are cherished, and you cherish.’
5: Pornography
Almost everything that has been discussed here so far is connected, in one way or another, to the new accessibility and expansion of pornography. The huge growth of pornography through the internet is what makes so much of the soft pornography in magazines, newspapers, music and cinema possible; it’s hard to object to any of the mainstream aspects of the hypersexual culture, from Nuts to lap-dancing clubs, given the great leviathan of obscenity that anyone can access at any time with a couple of clicks of a mouse at a computer. Anyone who wants to put magazines with naked women on the covers back onto the top shelf of newsagents, or to push strip clubs out of town centres, runs up against the fatalism created by the knowledge that the internet has brought all those images and far, far more to everyone’s desk.
Many women who would call themselves feminists have come to accept that they are growing up in a world where pornography is ubiquitous and will be part of almost everyone’s sexual experiences. Anna Span is the most famous and prolific female porn director in the UK, and she believes that positive effects have arisen for women in the way that pornogra
phy has now moved into the mainstream. In her view, this development has encouraged women to be more honest about their own sexuality. When I visited her in her Tunbridge Wells office, I found a matter-of-fact woman in her thirties, who was keen to convince me of the liberating possibilities of pornography. ‘Women are exploring their bodies more,’ she told me confidently. ‘They are learning to orgasm more. Sex shops are now much more female friendly; women can find toys and books and videos that relate to their sexuality.’ Span herself decided to start working in pornography when a trip to Soho as a young woman showed her how much there was catering for men’s sexuality, and how little for women. She calls herself a ‘Nietzschean feminist’ for refusing to see herself as a victim of this culture, and instead deciding to join men in producing pornography.
Anna Span’s view is no longer seen as that unusual. The mainstream media are often keen to pick up on the voices of women who are positive about pornography – including women who work in pornography. For instance, every Saturday the Guardian newspaper publishes a section called Work, which contains advice and tips on different careers. One day in 2007 the main interview was with one Daisy Rock, who spoke about her working hours – ‘I don’t stop working, except to sleep or go out’ – the money she earns, ‘anything from £350 to £500’ for a scene, adding up to around £64,000 a year, and that the only drawback of the work she does is that ‘feature films can be exhausting and repetitive at times … much like working on a mainstream movie’.1 In such an article it seems there could be no better career option for an intelligent, hardworking young woman, than to go into hardcore pornography.
Where pornography is glimpsed in mainstream art forms it now tends to be seen as an unexceptional part of women’s as well as men’s sex lives. For instance, in one episode of Sex and the City, Samantha stars in her own pornographic video of herself having sex with her boyfriend; in Adam Thirlwell’s first novel, Politics, couples watch pornography together and carefully mimic what they see: ‘Into their domestic repertoire, Anjali and Nana had introduced the sexual practice known as fisting … They did this, led by Anjali, using tips culled from internet pornography’2; in a recent mainstream cinema release, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the hero seduced the heroine by asking her to star in a porn movie with him. While it’s quite frequent to see this kind of tolerant reference to pornography in mainstream art, it has become rare to find any condemnation of it.
So we now live in a world in which even many feminists have stopped trying to condemn pornography. This has been a huge turnaround in feminist thought. At one point in the 1980s it seemed that the primary energy of feminists was directed against pornography. The classic feminist critique of pornography saw women only as victims of a male-dominated pornography industry that was based on the degradation of women and encouraged violence against them. As Robin Morgan put it in 1974, ‘pornography is the theory, and rape the practice’3 and as Andrea Dworkin said in 1981, pornography makes men ‘increasingly callous to cruelty, to the infliction of pain, to violence against persons, to the humiliation or degradation of persons, to the abuse of women and children’.4 From the attempts of Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, the American lawyer, to legislate against pornography, to the demonstrations by British feminist groups at Soho sex shops,5 feminists made it known very clearly that they believed pornography was the enemy of liberation.
Yet even at that time there were feminists who dissented from this point of view. These feminists insisted that there was no clear-cut link between pornography and violence against women; although some research suggested that watching pornography encouraged men to hold views that trivialised sexual violence, other research suggested that consuming pornography actually correlated with less aggressive sexual attitudes and behaviour.6 These feminists said that there was no legislating for sexual desire; what one person saw as arousing and delightful, another might see as exploitative and another as ridiculous.7 As more feminists with differing views joined the debate, it became clear that the classic feminist critique of pornography had left something very important out: it assumed that women never take any pleasure in pornography. This is clearly wrong. There are intelligent women, choosing and thinking for themselves, who do enjoy watching pornography, and some enjoy making it and acting in it too; we can no longer deny the intense sexual power of pornography for women as well as men.
Now that many women have talked openly about the pleasures of pornography themselves, there is no point trying to return to that classic feminist critique that set all women on one side, and all men on the other side, of pornography. For some feminists, this means that, rather than arguing against the very existence of porn, they are looking more for equality within a world already saturated by pornography. Just as with Anna Span, what we tend to hear from feminists now is not so much a desire to hold back the tide of pornography, as the desire to jump right in. For instance, Charlotte Roche, the German author of the novel Wetlands, is a feminist who believes that: ‘There is such a nice range for men, they have so much opportunity – porn on the Internet, wanking booths … it’s a big shame that we don’t have that for women.’8 Or as Zoe Margolis, the author of Girl with a One-track Mind, has said, ‘If we are to buy in to the sex industry (and let’s face it, objectionable as much of it might be, it’s not disappearing any time soon) then perhaps it is time women started making demands as consumers, rather than just being the providers.’9
I can see why some women are arguing that the way forward really rests on creating more opportunities for women in pornography, yet I think it is worth looking at why it is that some of us still feel such unease with the situation as it is now. The muffling of dissent about pornography has coincided with a time in which pornography has massively expanded. For a long time I was sceptical about the claim that the internet had really changed people’s access to and attitudes to pornography. After all, people who want it have surely always been able to find pornographic material to suit them, whether they were living in fifth-century Athens or the 1950s. But the evidence I looked at for this book convinced me that the internet has driven a real change for many people, especially younger people. If once upon a time someone who was truly fascinated by pornography might have found, with some difficulty, ten, or twenty, or a hundred images to satisfy themselves, now anyone can click on a single website and find twenty, a hundred, a thousand choices of videos and images, with the most specialist and violent next to the most gentle and consensual.
Statistics now tell a story that is hard to ignore. A survey carried out in 2006 found that one in four men aged twenty-five to forty-nine had viewed hardcore online pornography in the previous month, and that nearly 40 per cent of men had viewed pornographic websites in the previous year.10 But it is the prevalence of pornography consumption among children that is most striking. While 25 per cent of children aged ten to seventeen in a study carried out in 2000 had seen unwanted online pornography in the form of popups or spam, the numbers of children who see pornography this way is rising quite quickly, and in 2005 a similar study found that 34 per cent had seen unwanted pornography when they were online.11 In this survey, 42 per cent of the 10- to 17-year-olds had seen pornography, whether wanted or unwanted – but this has been dwarfed by results found in other surveys. In another study in Canada, 90 per cent of 13- and 14-year-old boys and 70 per cent of girls the same age had viewed pornography. Most of this porn use had been over the internet, and more than one-third of the boys reported viewing pornographic DVDs or videos ‘too many times to count’.12 While once someone could live their whole lives without ever seeing anyone but themselves and their own partners having sex, now the voyeur’s view of sex has been normalised, even for children. For an increasing number of young people, pornography is no longer something that goes alongside sex, but something that precedes sex. Before they have touched another person sexually or entered into any kind of sexual relationship, many children have seen hundreds of adult strangers having sex.
When I spoke to
one teenager who is studying for his A levels and quoted statistics to him that said that the majority of young teenagers have looked at pornography, Luke High laughed. ‘More like a hundred per cent,’ he said. ‘It’s when you’re thirteen and fourteen that everyone starts looking and talking about it at school – before you’re having sex, you’re watching it. I think that those lads’ mags are only read by certain kinds of boys, my friends wouldn’t read them, to be honest, just like they wouldn’t buy the Sun. But pornography – it crosses every social class, every cultural background. Everyone watches porn. And I think that’s entirely down to the internet – not just your home computer, but everything that can connect, your phone, your BlackBerry, whatever you’ve got – everyone’s watching porn. Adults have got to know what teenagers are doing, and if you’re caught you get told off. But I never had a serious discussion with a teacher or anyone about it.’
Now that the classic feminist critique of pornography has disappeared from view there are, as this teenager noted, few places that young people are likely to hear much criticism or even discussion about the effects of pornography. But this massive colonisation of teenagers’ erotic life by commercial pornographic materials is something that it is hard to feel sanguine about. By expanding so much in a world that is still so unequal, pornography has often reinforced and reflected the inequalities around us.
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Page 11
